According to the New York Times, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota requested rate increases averaging about 50 percent for 2016, and a vice president there said his company had not seen an improvement in the health status of new customers.
“WASHINGTON — Hoping to avoid another political uproar over the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration is trying to persuade states to cut back big rate increases requested by many health insurance companies for 2016…”
[button link=”https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/us/politics/obama-administration-urges-states-to-cut-health-insurers-requests-for-big-rate-increases.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0″]Read the NYT article[/button]
It’s weird, because nobody that The New York Times pays any heed to predicted that rates would inevitably go up.
I ran two websites detailing the horrendous and criminal behavior of insurance companies. Even John McCain knows they’re monsters. Throwing healthcare to them was throwing chickens to the foxes. Everyone has heard insurance horror stories, so Obama was stupid or malign in throwing health insurance right back at the industry that destroyed it.
I even had personal experience over 30 years ago, long before people suspected how vile health insurers were. I worked at Blue Cross of NE PA as a junior programmer. They put me on a program the previous programmer couldn’t balance, even though the accounting dept was going nuts over it. They had fired him, and also fired the programmer who followed me since no one could balance it.
I couldn’t balance it, so I rewrote the whole thing, knowing it Had to balance. It still didn’t. So I looked in the job stream. As a junior programmer they didn’t expect me to know the intracacies of IBM Job Control Language, but I had taught it to myself.
In the Job Stream there was an IBM MVS/OS JCL Selective Sort. They look like Greek, but I could read it. It directed the computer to just delete all records of very old people with chronic (therefore expensive) diseases, who had no living relatives (to fight for them.) Basically, they were denying care to old people who would die without a fight – and at a rate of 100%. But since the records were deleted, the accounting dept. couldn’t balance their books, and was pestering me every day for a solution. Only there was no solution since the JCL was there on purpose.
I was so naive at the time I just thought it was a terrible mistake so I told my trainer, Tom Niezgoda. I was fired the next morning on some pretext, my password revoked, and my belongings boxed to be picked up, so I couldn’t bring proof. But as I said I was naive at the time and only realized this later when all the bad news about HMOs came out.
Death panels aren’t the GOP fantasy of some old guys sitting around a table putting thumbs down. That’s impossible given the number of patients. Death panels are Computerized.